Over the past year, web pages have on average become 25% bigger. We’re not talking about dimensions here, but download size. Based on the top 1,000 websites on the Internet, the average page size has gone from 626 kB to 784 kB.

A 25% size increase in just one year is rather drastic. With that kind of growth, the average web page will be 980 kB in just a year (amost 1 MB!). In five years, a page will be almost 2.4 MB. And that’s just an average, many pages will be significantly larger.

What is behind this exploding growth? Let’s find out.

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The full announcement is over at the Pingdom blog, but we thought this was interesting enough to all of you that we included a shorter announcement here in Royal Pingdom as well.

After more than six million performed tests, we thought it was time to give version 1.0 of our popular Full Page Test in Pingdom Tools a well-earned break. Actually, we’re giving it a full retirement, umbrella drinks and sunny beaches included. But don’t worry, version 2.0 of the Full Page Test is here to save the day! It’s still in beta, a few tweaks remain, but it’s fully functional so don’t hesitate to give it a spin.

This new Full Page Test is still completely free to use. It still helps you profile your website’s performance. But now it’s even better.

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The web browser market is an ever-changing landscape. It can sometimes be rocky ground for web designers and web developers trying to make their websites and services work for all the various browser versions available out there. It’s challenging work, to say the least.

That’s why it pays to be aware of what the web browser market looks like, and stay up to date. How many are using the various browsers out there? How many are using the latest versions? Which versions are the most common? How big an audience may you be annoying if your site isn’t perfect in a specific browser version?

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We’re happy to say that it’s going extremely well for Pingdom. Our uptime monitoring service keeps growing and growing, and we have some big plans for the future that will pretty much take us off the charts.

This is where YOU come in. We are looking for a few brave, kick-ass web developers and a masterful web designer to join our ranks here in Sweden. In return we can offer you a creative environment and the chance to work with some of the brightest minds in the business.

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The World Wide Web has promised a lot over the years. Thus far, some of those promises have been fulfilled, but there have also been disappointments. One area that I feel has been consistently disappointing in recent years is the promise of newer, more powerful, and more useful file formats. I’ll take a look at three of these: SVG, JPEG 2000, and MNG, below.

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Perl has been around since 1987 and became an early darling of web developers. These days, however, you don’t hear much about Perl. Everyone seems to be talking about trendier languages like PHP, Python and Ruby, with Perl left in the back as a neglected, not-so-hip cousin.

That might lead you to think that Perl is dying, but as it turns out, it’s still used by plenty of websites out there, including some pretty big hitters.

Here are some of the more popular sites that use Perl extensively today.

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Twitter is an extremely popular service with millions and millions of users, and now those users can get Pingdom alerts delivered right to their Twitter accounts.

Twitter is an excellent complement to Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service, and we’re very happy to open up our service to Twitter’s huge user base. Even better, since Pingdom now has free accounts it becomes a great companion to webmasters with a Twitter account. Getting alerted of website downtime has never been easier and never cost less (i.e. nothing).

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